Stock Advisory: Buy Mumbai Unlimited; Sell Terror Inc

Dear Terrorists. You’ve lost again. Sure, we know you did damage. Huge damage. Three ear-shattering blasts. Several deaths. Scores injured and maimed. Hundreds of heart-rending personal tragedies. Fear in the city. Anger, too. Politicians and TV anchors doing their worst to fish in troubled waters. [caption id=“attachment_41343” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Police patrol in rain near Zaveri bazar, one of three sites of explosions in Mumbai, early Thursday. Police are looking into “every possible hostile group” in their search for the culprits behind the triple bombing in Mumbai. Aijaz Rahi/AP”]  [/caption] But Mumbai, as always, is back on its feet again. In fact, it was up even before you fled the scenes. Well before the ambulances arrived, Mumbaikars pitched in to help the dead and injured. Well before you reached your rat-hole to hide from your own wanton act of destruction, the wounded and the departed were being moved to hospital and the debris removed. And if you don’t know you’ve lost again, you’re bigger losers than we give you credit for (if credit’s the word for this discreditable act). Even the stock market did not buy your big bang strategy. Look at the headlines and you’ll know why you’ve lost. “Yet again”, said The Times of India. “Mumbai Again,” said The Indian Express. “Attacked. Again,” said the Hindustan Times. When all newspapers have more or less the same headline, with “again” in it, you should know that you are boring us to death. Even the business papers had nothing new to say. “Mumbai attacked again,” said the Business Standard. One variation came from The Economic Times, which, rather unhelpfully, told us that “We are sitting ducks.” But it’s strap line harped on the same theme: “Terror returns to Mumbai.” When creative journalists cannot even think of a creative phrase to describe your destructive urges, you should know that your deadly antics are beginning to pall on us. They don’t work anymore. The truth is, Mumbai is a city for winners. It always was, and always will be. Maybe that’s why you have targeted it repeatedly. In the hope that your next depredation will bring it down. But you losers still don’t get it. Winners always see setbacks as temporary. Haven’t you heard the cliche, Tough times don’t last, tough people do? That’s Mumbai. If you know what makes Mumbai tick, you wouldn’t even attempt to put it down. Mumbai is a city of dreams. People come here to fulfill their dreams, whether it is to become a Bollywood actor, or get a job, or start a business, or make money in stocks. When dreams are your most important possession, we don’t like anyone messing around with it – with or without bombs. Sure, Mumbai is also a city of nightmares. It’s horribly congested. We have water problems, traffic jams, polluted air, terrible public amenities, sprawling slums, and very poor governance. And yes, we also have a few of your type, bent on killing and murdering unwary members of the public. But taking both the assets and liabilities of the city into account, the positive side of the ledger vastly overwhelms the negative. Our dreams always triumph over our nightmares. I know you have always targeted our dreams by creating new nightmares for us. But you don’t know the DNA of Mumbai. Look at all your failures, since the whole terror business began in 1993. You killed over 200 people in March, 1993, but the city was up on its feet the next day. It was Mumbai’s finest hour. You tried your stunts again in 2003, 2006, in 2008 and now in 2011. Not only in Mumbai, but in Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi, Jaipur, Varanasi, Bangalore, Guwahati, Ahmedabad – almost everywhere. But nothing worked. Want to know why? We have learnt and improved our ability to deal with your depredations even without official help from the police and government. Every time a blast happens, we initially run helter-skelter, close our shops, call our friends and relatives (or SMS them), and look for short-term safety. But the people closest to the tragedies rush to help. The shops reopen. People return to work. And life goes on. We have learnt the fire-drill without any help from the fire department or fire-starters like you. In short, you should know what you are up against. You can defeat the police, or the intelligence, or the government machinery for a while, but you can’t defeat an entire people. Let me again tell you why. Over the last two decades, you managed to set one community against another. We went through that self-defeating phase and blamed one another for your deadly handiwork. How you must have been laughing in those years. We know now that whatever the holy book you swear by, you are actually the true embodiment of evil. There is nothing holy in what you do. You are the enemy of every religion, every community. There is also another reason why you can never succeed. Unlike the US, which spent trillions of dollars trying to keep itself safe after 9/11, and launched into self-defeating two wars, we haven’t gone overboard trying to find every terrorist in every nook and corner. Not that we didn’t try. We made our mistakes, too. But we know that you can’t really hermetically seal a country from oddballs like you. We have learnt to live with the fact that even pest control cannot eradicate all pests. They can come back again. But here’s the real dope on why we will win. India is too diverse and too big to be frightened off by your kind of terrorism. A tiny nation can be frightened off, but not India. You are up against the law of diminishing returns. Every terror act gives you less bang for the buck. You can try and be more and more outrageous, but you are on a losing wicket here. The Indian people have learnt their lessons from all the mistakes they made over the last 20 years. We are no less vulnerable to the rhetoric of rabid politicians or communal organisations of every hue, but we are no longer afraid of facing the truth: we know that no one can prevent all acts of terror. We know that success against terror depends not only on our policing and intelligence, but in how we respond to it. If we start hitting out at various communities in blind outrage, we give you success. If we deal with it calmly, we defeat you. Lastly, Maximum Mumbai—which has been your biggest focal point of Terror Inc—has shown that nothing can shatter its dreams. Here’s my tip for you people: if you can’t beat us, join us. Mumbai is everybody’s dream city. Why not yours? If I were the betting type, I would bet on Mumbai, not you. My buy-and-sell recommendation for today and the long-term is this: Go long on Mumbai Unlimited; go short on Terror Inc. In the long run, Mumbai (and India) are blue chips. Terror Inc is a dud, never mind the blasts of Wednesday the 13th.